The sticky notes at the front of the page

(graphic inserted, as some people don't have the required font(s) to view the stars correctly, like The_Rose!)

Comments to be updated soon. New version, fixed CSS table to prevent wild spacing, and hopefully some code to help make my code stay validated. When I actually get around to it. Sigh.

Wednesday, May 31

Einstein quote of the day…

Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

Interesting but absolutely stupid site of the day.

itype.exe - itype.exe is a potentially very dangerous executable which can be removed best with this application. Get it before exeLibrary's partnership expires and prices return to normal

with itype.exe as a hyperlink to the idownloads.com site, hawking their wintasks solution. While it might have some valid exe's listed, one has to worry about the good stuff that this site is actually saying is bad stuff. itype.exe is NOT bad software.

Wednesday, May 24

ringtonia.com: Teenager repellent "Mosquito" turned into ringtone

Remember the teenager repellent called Mosquito I wrote about a few days ago, the ultrasonic device that emits a sound only audible to teenagers? Shopkeepers in England have been installing them in order to prevent anti social youths from hanging out in front of their stores.

Well now techno-savvy pupils have recorded the ultra-high sound - audible only to under-20s- onto their cell phones, and are now receiving calls and text messages in class - without teachers having the faintest idea of what is going on.

The kids call it Teen Buzz, and it's spreading it from phone to phone via text messages and Bluetooth.

I find this pretty damn funny. I also have to call BULLSHIT! on this. I doubt that a cell phone would actually be able to playback such a high frequency sound. I doubt that the range is higher even to my poor middle-aged ears can here. I'm going to look for this ringtone however. :)

Monday, May 22

Misc. Cause there's not enough Misc. in the world

The power flutuated here this afternoon. The freaking fscking UPS took my computer down. I was pissed! I look at the back of the unit to see what's happening, and I've managed to plug the computer into the surge-protected (but not battery backed up) spot. Oops! I was wondering why I should be able to get 10 hours out of my backup. Now that I've got things plugged in where they belong, it's down to 27 minutes, much more realistic.

Wired News: Whistle-Blower's Evidence, Uncut

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.

In a public statement Klein issued last month, he described the NSA's visit to an AT&T office. In an older, less-public statement recently acquired by Wired News, Klein goes into additional details of his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T building in San Francisco.

Here we present Klein's statement in its entirety, with inline links to all of the document excerpts where he cited them. You can also download the complete file here (pdf). The full AT&T documents are filed under seal in federal court in San Francisco.

This is an important story. I've already mirrored the PDF here as soon as it's done uploading, which should be soon.

There are too many denials being thrown out, and somebody is lying bigtime, and it really looks like it's the phone companies that are lying.

Boing Boing: U. Florida cops ask fiction writer for fingerprints, DNA

The university police at Gainesville's University of Florida have targeted a graduate student in the English program over his publication of a piece of horror fiction on his LiveJournal.

This is pretty stupid. My tax dollars at work. And then the police don't respond, as they should. Lt. Sharkey needs to be fired, there is no excuse for that lack of response. Speaking as a former civil servant, I am well qualified to make that statement.

Friday, May 19

Things to do...

Create cmd/monad/wsh/js/something command to recreate the technorati links I used to have with Greasemonkey. I haven't seen anything that fixes it since 1.5 broke the script I had.

Update the comments software. Really. This time I mean it

Fill propane cylinders. Hurricane season is coming.

Other stuff I'm sure

Ultraedit wordlist munging

Install new motherboard and/or install new hard drive and/or reinstall Windows 2003 Turns out it wasn't any of those three problems. Google desktop, in doing it's scanning was managing to create phanton hard disks that Windows would "see", but not actually acess. Which would hang the disk I/O queue for the system, causing holy hell to break out. I didn't want it to be indexing my old hard drive that I had connected, and by having that unconnected, actually caused things to unfold like they did. I've downloaded a newer desktop, so we'll see what happens when I remove and reinstall that. And leave that old hard drive disconnected from the system until the indexing is complete!

Computer blues update

I just found out I had a hard drive I didn't know about.

Actually, it seems that my USB to IDE cable may be causing me the troubles that I've been experiencing, even though it seems that if I plug it in without anything attached, it usually doesn't do anything. But now it seems it does. I dunno. If I still have hard drive issues now...

Thursday, May 18

Speaking of…

My linkblog hasn't been updated in some time. I hadhave a bunch of links that I wanted to get uploaded. The last computer crash lost those. Actually, trying to use an ERD and a restore point cost me those. I've got some put away in an update list for my links to monitor, but I lost a bunch.

I need to either work on deli.cio.us and start marking them, and figuring out a way to puke those onto the linkblog, or come up with my own program that immediately takes what I give it and post it to the blog. None of this wait for a bit and then process them. I think it would be better, that way I can immediately type my comment if I have one, and don't have to worry about trying to keep up with it. It was becoming impossible.

I'd absolutely love to be able to say that my links were unduplicated, but I'm thinking that in the current time, I'm going to go with a real time version of what I had been doing batch.

If I get that going, then maybe I can look at a more database driven program, one that I might actually be able to suck in the data from Blogger, and then spit my own stuff out. I might actually just use Blogger's engine for it. Shoot a bunch of stuff at it (and be labeled a splog at that point?), and let Blogger format the pages for me instead. I dunno.

Update 5/20: Joy, oh joy. I found the links. So my links aren't lost. They just haven't been posted yet. More joy, it's been 12 hours, and the computer hasn't had one of its fits yet. Looking at the event log, it appears that for some reason, the computer wants to access a phantom USB hard drive, which proceeds to hang the rest of the disk read/write queue. The culprit in this? I beleive it was an old version of Google Desktop. I've stopped it, and it seems to be running fine (although a bit hot — time to clean the CPU heat sink!)

Computer blues

My computer is now taking something like 15 minutes to boot. I've been running into some delayed write issues with this computer, one with the $MFT, so I think my system has managed to get royally screwed up. Also, tonight, I had to unplug a USB hub, because new devices weren't getting recognized. But now my flash drive is accessible, and my phone is charging.

I'm going to go through the event database, and look and see what the Microsoft knowledgebase has to say about it. I may have to do some tuning.

I've scanned the computer with Computer Associate's eTrust AV. I've tried to scan with TrendMicro's online scan, but it blows the browser out after about 15 minutes of running. Firefox or IE, regular boot or safe mode. So it makes one wonder. I've also had issues keeping the CMOS set the way I want it. I set the boot order to be HP DVDRW drive, then the motherboard IDE drive (currently a Western Digital 200 gigger), and the first one then get's changed to boot from the Promise card connected IDE hard drive, or the DVD-ROM drive.

Battery going bad? The date and time aren't having issues, which they would be if that were the case.

So I dunno.

One issue that I was having was that middle clicking wasn't working the way it was supposed to. I got rid of my KatMouse program that allows me to control a window scrolling just by hovering over it, and the issue went away. Looked at the preferences, and found out that it was a setting there that was throwing me for a loop.

Sysinternal.com's RootKitRevealer isn't showing anything that is actually stealthed, so I'm not root kitted, at least at the Windows level (a hypervisor that loads before Windows could technically be loaded, but I don't think so).

When the delayed write errors start happening, I lose control of everything. Network is "up", but it's not really active, I can't even ping the firewall. Anything connected via USB is dead. I have to turn the computer off, then reboot, and then it "works", or at least a facsimile there of.

I'm supposed to be the expert at this crap, and I don't even have a clue.

I have a tech disk, that maybe I can update with the latest and greatest drivers and update that.

Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

I remember having a conversation with somebody about the Clipper chip when it was anounced 10 years ago or so. "You don't have to worry about it if you aren't doing anything wrong."

Wednesday, May 17

Legal Fiction

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

What good would getting new cell phones do them? The phone numbers already have names attached to them, and the new phone numbers will still have their names attached to them. Now, getting pay-as-you go phone, paying with cash, bein[g] careful about who you call on that phone and probably changing phone numbers every so often (maybe exchanging phone SIMS, like people exchange those customer reward cards), and you're getting somewhere. Public phones, if you could find them for outgoing calls.

Legal Fiction

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

What good would getting new cell phones do them? The phone numbers already have names attached to them, and the new phone numbers will still have their names attached to them. Now, getting pay-as-you go phone, paying with cash, bein careful about who you call on that phone and probably changing phone numbers every so often (maybe exchanging phone SIMS, like people exchange those customer reward cards), and you're getting somewhere. Public phones, if you could find them for outgoing calls.

Your World. Delivered . . . to the NSA | Save Access:

Gee the NSA is monitoring domestic phone calls. I wish I could say I was surprised, but in today's political headroom, I can believe it. This could be quite interesting:

More Information

Section 2702 of Title 18, part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, provides that "a provider of ... electronic communication service [including telephone service] to the public shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service ... to any governmental entity" without the customer's consent or a subpoena or court order. Under section 2707, carriers face civil liability, including minimum damages of $1,000 per violation, punitive damages, and attorneys fees. Government employees who participated in a violation also may face administrative discipline.

The mininum fines could be quite astronomical, if this ever gets in front of a judge. Welcome to 1984, Orwell was just a little ahead of his time.

Calling this a facist state is a misnomer, but I don't know what else to call it. The Constitution has been eroded severely, and the people that should be correcting this won't. They either think it helps them, they believe in the "cause" of trading freedom for security, both, or I don't know.

Tuesday, May 9

I'm back!

This is a quick note that hopefully lets everyone know I'm still alive.

I can't say that for my computer however. :-(

I'm on a new hard drive, and a new install of Windows 2003. Symantec AV screwed me over, and turned my nice machine into something looking like sludge (Bill A., if you're reading this, then you definately understand!) Then Roxio kept wanting to re-install Napster (Why? I took it out the first time!). I couldn't find my old CDs (I have since), and decided to run the next version, which I left running while I ran to a doctor's appointment. I was worried when I ran into JEA (the electric company) working on lines just down the road from my house.

Got back, and sure enough, they managed to drop the electricity to kill my machine and make sure I had to reset a bunch of clocks. But my machine wouldn't boot. It just (seemingly) hung. I turned off system reset on recovery, and had a BSOD. A bad driver (gee, you think so?).

I have replaced the wornout UPS with another UPS (batter is replaceable on the old one, which I will be doing), installed another hard drive (to try and rescue what I can from it, which I thought would be everything), got Windows 2003 reinstalled, and mostly configured. But when I wanted to get some data back, my one time trip with Sysinternal's ERD screwed me royal, as I no longer have a user profile. Not even a subdirectory. It has been changed into a 4 meg file. No inbox from my Thunderbird, nothing to be restored from my desktop. I got hosed. Tried to unerase anything, and it's gone. CHKDSK doesn't even show anything amiss, so I got raped with a big screw.

I'm currently trying to copy some data over (about 100 gigs - OK, that's done now) and have done what I can without rebooting with a bunch of installed stuff. Here's hoping that this works, after I publish this and do a reboot.